How to blow $6 billion on a tech project

Military's 15-year quest for the perfect radio is a blueprint for failing big.

Exploding scope

When JTRS and GMR launched, the services broke out huge wish lists when they drafted their initial requests for proposals on individual JTRS programs. While they narrowed some of these requirements as the programs were consolidated, requirements were constantly revised before, during, and after the design process.

Bauman told me that when he took over the overall program, each of the five sub-programs within JTRS aimed not at an incremental goal, but at “delivering everything at once. That was a recipe for disaster.” The original programs defined requirements for 32 different waveforms—which made designing each radio for the program that much more complex.

Even after full-scale development was approved for GMR (then called "Cluster 1"), a 2005 Government Accountability Office review found that the designs for hardware kept changing (and growing). In fact, the number of design drawings for the project tripled in the year after development got the green light.

Bauman was therefore brought in to unify and reorganize the JTRS programs. But even the new leadership didn’t end the mission creep. In an interview with David Axe, Col. Dan Hughes, who managed the GMR program during Bauman’s tenure at JTRS, said the radio continued to get more complicated and more expensive. GMR blew through scheduled deadlines as “we tried to make it better and better and better.” GMR got so much "better," as Axe notes, that the gear reached a backbreaking 207 pounds—making the “mobile” part of its name highly theoretical.

Ward, the acquisition officer, was particularly blunt about the “better” part of GMR:

To be specific, the problem is rooted in the way project leaders defined “better” over a decade and a half. They seemed to mistake it for a synonym of “more.” How exactly did the Army go about making the radio better and better? By increasing its complexity, extending the schedule, spending more money and making the device larger. Engineers continuously added features and functions and capabilities on paper, all of which made the design worse and made the users wait. Vaporware much?

As a result of this sort of program bloat, by 2007 the JTRS program as a whole had spent billions and billions—without any radios fielded. The first production contract, for "interim" single-channel handhelds, was awarded to Thales in June 2007.

Forgetting Moore’s Law

Since JTRS started, we've seen some advances in software-defined radio technology. NASA is testing SDR as part of its Space Telecommunications Radio System, and it will put an experimental SDR on the International Space Station. Aspects of SDR technology have been used in Wi-Fi devices and cellular phones—for example, the iPhone. But SDR as conceived by the JTRS effort hasn’t been widely adopted in the commercial realm, and remains largely the realm of hobbyists, with kits like GNU Radio.

While JTRS’s SDR approach focused on making one radio that could do everything with FPGAs, it was actually a bet against Moore’s Law—that it would be cheaper and easier to have one radio you could add new waveforms to than simply buying another radio. But it turns out, as the consumer wireless market has proven, that it may be cheaper to make lots of single-purpose radios that plug together and get tossed when there’s an upgrade.

When JTRS began, there was no WiFi, no 3G or no 4G wireless, and commercial radio communications was relatively expensive. But the consumer industry didn't even look at SDR as a way to keep its products relevant in the future. No, ASIC-based digital signal processors are cheap, and new products also tend to include faster chips and new hardware features; people prefer buying a new $100 WiFi router when some future 802.11z protocol appears instead of buying a $3,000 wireless router today that is “future proofed” (and you can't really call anything based on CORBA “future proofed”).

Without a solid radio product, then, the Army has started to look at options like tactical cellular networks for short-range communications, using proven commercial technology mounted on vehicles and even aerostats (tethered blimps) to create bubbles of connectivity at speeds the waveforms defined a decade ago can’t even handle.

Waterfall methodology torture

In the end, what really killed GMR—and what threatens all the other JTRS programs—was a failure to ship. Undersecretary of Defense Kendall blamed “execution problems” by vendors and the cost growth of the program as reasons for GMR’s cancellation, but those cost growth and execution problems were based on the fact that no GMR radios were ever even tested by potential users until 2010. After 13 years in the pipeline, what those users saw was a radio that weighed as much as a drill sergeant, took too long to set up, failed frequently, and didn’t have enough range.

JTRS as a whole continues, though in a pared-down form. So far, only one sub-program has delivered actual radios—the CISCHR program, which has since dropped the "Interim" in its name and become CSCHR. It has now delivered more than 150,000 handheld radios thus far that communicate mostly with the services' legacy systems. The Army's other mobile radio program, Handheld Manpack & Small Form Fit (HMS), will deliver another handheld radio—the Rifleman Radio—starting early next year (though the radio went through a complete redesign from its original form). And the Multifunctional Information Distribution System (MIDS) for Navy and Air Force aircraft was approved for full production and fielding in April.

Soldiers testing the JTRS Rifleman Radio, a voice and data radio that will start deploying in 2013

US Army

But the future of JTRS-based programs that haven't been cancelled isn't certain—the services can still choose to purchase other radios. Over the last 15 years, they've had to do just that. The Marine Corps, tired of waiting for new equipment, built its own battlefield network system for the war in Iraq, called CONDOR—based on off-the-shelf satellite phone and encrypted WiFi technology. And other communications systems based on commercial communications technology are already in the field.

Meanwhile, radio vendors not tied to JTRS have demonstrated that they can do most of what GMR was supposed to do at a fraction of the per-radio cost. If JTRS had focused on rapid releases and taken a more modular approach, and tested and deployed early, the Army could have had at least 80 percent of what it wanted out of GMR today, instead of what it has now—a certified radio that it will never deploy.

Promoted Comments

I worked on one of the WNW waveforms for HMS. I can't overstate how far this architecture is from being plug-and-play with waveforms. Any change in model of FPGA or DSP blows an entire design out of the water. At the time I believe about three fourths of our FPGA group (so about 10-12 people) was working on WNW waveform porting. Those four million lines of code in the JTRS repo cannot be dropped into future devices.

I can't comment on military radio (beyond six months commerical working on something like a mobile network for a cab company) but I can comment on CORBA and C++. What a pain in the butt. If there was ever a standard designed to suck the fun of programming and introduce you to many new and exciting ways to leak memory then CORBA is your friend.

If someone says, "Hey, want to work on some CORBA C++" then run. There are so many better ways to earn money it's not funny.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.